This is added functionality to just having a data repository, but it does not provide the same level of functionality that XNS could provide - not that MikeBabcock implied that it did of course.
I do like the idea of privacy contracts that some of XNS's features are built upon.
This does seem to be the intent of the XNS system's privacy contracts. The users of the data have to agree on how the data is used by legally binding contracts before they can have access to the data itself.
From the FAQ: This contract specifies the privacy and security terms governing the data to be exchanged, including the specific
privacy permissions and synchronization permissions granted by the data owner.
Why not simply offer remote storage facilities that allow the storage of arbitrary encrypted data? Personal agents can then
fetch that data using a username and password through, for example, LDAP. That data is decrypted on the user's
computer (or cell, pda, etc.).
Well, many of the uses for this type of data require the exchange of the data with others, rather than simply the storage of the data for your own use. It may be nice to have personel access to your medical records in case you ever want to remember exactly which toe you broke in the third grade. It would probably be even more useful if you could allow select individuals such as your current doctor to have the ability to access the information, and only that information, you would grant them access to.
I want the child-car-seat manufacturer to be always able to send me recall notices and thus I need them to be able to find my mailing address, even when I move. XNS protocols promise this ability while preventing the child-car-seat manufacturer using that information for junk mail, if that is how I set up the privacy contract.
These types of data exhanges, regardless where the data is stored and who controls the access to it, will require some sort of data-exchange protocol. XNSorg seems to be working towards that protocol development in an open standards way which gives me more confidence than many of the other initiatives I have seen.
While it might be good to have complete control over your data and agents by way of not having Microsoft or anyone else store the sensitive information, it does make it a little less convenient to have to do the maintenance yourself.
Having to carry all that information with you (maybe in a PDA or something?) if you want access to it is an additional burden.
Perhaps having an open standard for exchange of this type of information such as done by http://xns.org/, would allow multiple competing agencies to act as costodians. Give people choice and perhaps some of the control and privacy (and cost) issues would be less pressing than if all data was held by a single player such as Microsoft.
The article by Michael McCandless (stupid PDF file!) addresses some of the issues that XNS tries to address - albeit with the idea of the personal information residing on your network connected home computer rather than on an XNS-server run by some company that you decide to trust.
Now if XNS would get around to releasing their open source code examples and the detail technical specifications perhaps there could be more motion to widespread adoption. They claim plans to do so "real soon now".
With that said, XNS's ecard address book features are pretty nifty even at this early development stage.
I do agree that declaring war on a country that sponsors this type of attact could be justified. The "rule of law" also covers how we go about declaring a state of war.
There are however many problems thinking that war is the only or even first response that should be considered. What do we do if it turns out to not be state sponsored? If it was the FLQ do we start bombing Montreal or Ottawa? (The Federation du Liberation du Quebec was responsible for a number of bombings and deaths in the 1970's) If it was the IRA do we bomb Dublin? If it was a Protestant Irish group do we bomb Dublin again?
What level of state sponsorship is sufficient to assign responsibility? PETA is a registered non-profit organization in Australia, as are the boy-scouts. If either of them turns up as being responsible somehow do we level Perth?
What level of evidence should we use? If we bomb some-small-country into the ground and it turns out we were mistaken, what do we do then? What if group A tried to make it look like group B did the deed? (Which could happen even if group A was not involved at all.) Wanna get someone in deep deep deep do-do? Make people think it was their fault.
If we investigate and find out who is responsible (which could include state leaders) and indite them and ask for them to be extradited, and they are not forthcoming - at that point I would have much less problem with the declaration of war.
Part of the reason people resort to terrorism is the feeling that they are powerless within the system. The best way to combat terrorism and revolution and instability in my opinion is to ensure an effective, impartial, and fair legal system in addition to mechanisms for everyone to feel properly represented in governing their lives and future. Obviously the USA cannot do much to make sure that group A feels good about their situation with group B in country C (though foreign policy does have some influence in this area), but we can, and the very least, hope that the USA will follow both the spirit and the letter of the law when pursuing even the most evil of villans.
Someone somewhere does need to be taught the lesson that America will defend its people viciously against actions of this
sort. But lots of people everywhere need to know for a fact that America stands for freedom and liberty, and that we will
never as a people let stand any action that takes freedom or liberty away from any individual. The moment that we
condemn anyone, criminal, terrorist organization, or foreign country without due process we have given up all of our
freedoms.
Agreed. The rule of law is one of the most important factors of modern "western" society.
Probably not, but a secure single sign on would be nice, if the proper privacy and security issues can be addressed. I think that XNS has a chance of doing this type of thing better than any of the closed source alternatively like Passport.
Re:Talking specifically of Einstein.
on
Are Men Obsolete?
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· Score: 1
There is some evidence to suggest that much of Einstein's early work (special theory of relativity, etc.) was greatly aided by his first wife. Some have suggested the majority of that work was done by her.
A google.com search on "einstein's wife" turns up a number of hits and books, including this or this or here.
None can really doubt that Einstein wasn't brilliant, but perhaps at least one woman was also not too shabby?
The best system is probably to mount the solar cells on the building roof in an optimal position and feed that energy into the grid or batteries, then charge the car's batteries/flywheel/hydorgen tank/whatever from that source.
If you are going to spend money on expensive solar cells and related electronics, you might as well put them in the best place where they can work most efficiently for the longest amount of time.
For short trips, there was a neat story in Discover about a electrical assisted pedal vehicle that sounded pretty cool.
Hey! Canada Post delivers great value! Only $0.39 for delivery coast to coast to coast! Where else can you store a first class letter for under one cent per day?
I don't think that this machine is really much more than an evolution of the print on demand machines that currently exist.
The thing that holds them back I think is not so much the price of the hardware, but the lack of content.
But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.
iUniverse is cool - they will take any book you own the intelectual property for and make it available to all bookstores with an ISBN and standard ordering systems, for basically nothing. If you have a book that you wrote that went out of print, send them a copy and they scan it and for free, it is now back in and you can earn roalties. If you just wrote a new book and want it published, they'll do that too for a few hundred bucks send you a few copies and make your book available.
iUniverse doesn't do editing or promotion or anything like that, but that could be handled by a standard publisher. When Amazon or someone else orders up some copies, iUniverse prints them out and ships them off, on demand with no wasted money for storage of unwanted books.
They have a number of titles that would otherwise be unavailable, and will have those titles available "forever".
From what I understand, they seem to be set up to publish one's books in perpetuity. After they get a book together (manuscript, cover, edits, etc.) they make it available via the web, phone order, as well as through any traditional bookstore or places like Amazon.com via the standard ISBN ordering abilities. Whenever they get an order for a book, they print one, send it off, and cut a cheque for the author.
I don't think they do any promotion of the books, but for out of print books by previously published authors they also don't seem to charge any fee, so it seems like a no-risk (or at least minimal risk) type of activity.
There might be similar places around, and I don't know how good this place is, but I do know of at least one very good technical Macintosh book who's author is using this service.
Paypal groups all Canadians in with those evil international terrorists and scam artists who live outside the good ol' USofA.
There are more hoops to jump through and restrictions (and fees) on international accounts at PayPal.
For this reason, I've maintained my USA PayPal account, even though it now has an incorrect USA addresses "confirmed" along with it. My Canadian PayPal account I was going to close completely, but I have kept it alive in case they someday normalize their policies.
Robert Woodhead who runs the "shareware" web promotion system Selfpromotion.com has an interesting article about using the "tipping" model for payments of intelectual property.
There is an article about it here, as well as his own words here.
I have started to use PayPal to send a few bucks to people who's freeware I use or who's causes I like. I keep about $20 in my PayPal account that I have generated from ebay sales of thinks like junk-to-me books or electronic bits, and occasionally send $5 to someone for GPL software or things like that.
I think that this model for content payment is workable, but maybe not at the corporate level.
Re:Internet-based grocery delivery can work ..
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
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· Score: 1
.. if you cut out the middleman.
For this business model to be truly effective, it's going to have to be the stores themselves that take the
orders, assemble them, and then deliver them to the customers.
I think that this type of model can be used to set up a network of local stores. Someone external supply the web front end, and the store does all the rest.
I have not tried them out yet (and with local stores doing the work the service might be quite variable), but plan on using them next year when we move to Peterborough, ON, served by Charlotte Pantry, just down the street from our new house.
If you are not using such a service yet, go check to see if they have a presence in your Canadian or USian postal code. If not, you can send them the contact information for your favourite local grocer and perhaps get service started.
Of course there isn't (I think Denny's will give you one on your birthday...), but since the non-solar industry gets huge tax breaks and indirrect subsidation shouldn't we elliminate that too?
The bailout monies being talked about for the California energy companies are similar in magnitude to that required to set up solar panels on enough roofs to generate the energy shortfall currently causing blackouts. Which is a better use of our monies?
The GPL (if you'd read
it before commenting like you understand it) states that source code to GPL'd apps must be made available to
any who want it
Actually, it says that it must be provided for no additional or only nominal charge to people to whom the binaries are provided. It sets no limit on charges for the binaries and sets no requirement that it be provided to non-customers.
If you want to charge $9999999 for your linux distribution, you can. You need not provide sources to anyone but your customers.
Granted, however, that since your customers can redistribute it once they have it, that might not be a good business model. However if you can make just one sale, maybe that would be enough...
The license permitted 'use for any purpose in source or binary form'. It did not permit modification. This was
simply a misunderstanding.
One might think that one purpose of source form would be for modification, and thus would fall under the "any purpose" section.
The actual lisence states: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted..."
Again, one could argue that without further clarification, "...use in source and binary forms..." would include modification of the source, since that is one of the primary uses of source code. Similar arguements could be made about using the code in other works.
Thus it is not completely unjustified in stating that the "clarification" clause that was added did in fact substatively change the lisence the code was released under.
Even better, just modify your hosts file to redirect all cddb traffic for all applications to the freedb.org servers.
If you run a DNS systemse you could do the same.
Those witout DNS servers to muck about with can just modify your hosts file like this example or according to the instructions for Mac OS 9 and never worry about it again. There are also a variety of mirrors that one could point to.
This also means that all of your applications that would normaly want to use CDDB will use freedb.org without having to change their settings or hack their resources.
Now does anyone want to let me know how to easily do this with Mac OS X? I can't seem to get the Netinfo utility to do it effectively.
While you are at it, you might want to play similar tricks with advertising banners and the like. Here's more information.
This is a loop-hole to increase the term of the copyright. Instead of expiring 70 years after the death of the writer, it
expires 70 years after the company folds. The question is, how long will it take a company that is designed to have
exactly $0 profit to disband? I say never.
There is a maximum length of time for any copyright in the compyright legislation. Currently it is this lifetime+70 years thing for the creator or some set timeframe (100 years?) for the corporation.
No, there is a relation ship between ice-cream and sexual assualts because they both have some relationship to some other factor. I think this is because ice-cream sales tend to follow good, warm weather when people are outside more often, and maybe wearing less clothing.
I suspect that there is a negative coorelation between such crimes and sales of snow-blowers, for example.
Crime could decrease upon the introduction of cameras (and I am not saying that it does) because administrations that install cameras might also spend more on policing, education, prosecution, and other things. Maybe cameras are installed when there is money available such as when tax revenues are up due to a strong economy and good employement stats, which also tend to decrease some crime stats independant of any camera installations.
The gap between the rich and poor, worker rights, environmental standards...
According to who ? You ? You just stated your opinion...
Yeah, I'm a stinker, eh?
Surely though you have seen various studies that question the US's supremacy in all sorts of standard of living areas? One has to have lived in a cave over the past decade to avoid health care comparisons. Cecil Adams did some reporting on average work week and vacation days at http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010302.html. The UN makes reports all the time. Various US groups make all sorts of reports.
Even if one disagrees with the conclusions of these types of reports, the mere fact that there are billions of people around the world who have set up their societies differently than the USA should give one pause. The mere fact that there are many countries with obviously similar levels of citizen happiness should show that the USA is not necessarily doing everything the only way possible. The fact that many in the USA do not think that the USA is doing everything the way it should might be considered to be evidence enough.
But this isn't supposed to be a bash of the USA, but rather a bash of the idea that "There is nothing more important than wealth creation." and that "The kind of socialist ideal implied by open source, where no-one makes pits of money is very bad for the country.". There are many "socialist" types of ideals that are good for the country - examples can be drawn from both inside and outside the USA (public infrastructure like roads, public libraries, public education, various forms of taxes and tax support, etc.) People can and do argue about each of these sorts of things, but as a society we have decided that they have significant value.
Wealth creation isn't everything. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, far from it, but it shouldn't be everyone's end goal. If it was, we would all be poorer.
There is nothing more important than wealth creation. Wealth creation allows for true redistribution of
wealth. Companies such as Microsoft have made tons of money and now Bill Gates is giving billions away.
...
The kind of socialist ideal implied by open source, where no-one makes pits of money is very bad for the
country. If this happens, you get barely affluent people - people such as yourself, who in the main don't
pursue any philanthropic activity.
The USA is hardly a model for "good living". The health stats for the US poor are not very great compared to other industrialized nations. The gap between the rich and poor, worker rights, environmental standards, and all sorts of other things that seem to be better addressed in other more "socialist ideal" influenced countries is not the best commendation for the current system.
Your points about innovation may turn out to be true - but really there is no good data to support them yet. It is certainly true that financial considerations can provide great incentives, but it is also true that without proper checks and balances such drives can make for terrible long term decisions that can effect the entire society.
I would put forth that anyone who thinks that wealth creation is the most important thing in the universe needs to spend a little more time thinking about community, family, health, and happiness. Money can be an important tool, but it is just that, a tool. Don't be just a tool seeker.
Slashdot Mirror
This is added functionality to just having a data repository, but it does not provide the same level of functionality that XNS could provide - not that MikeBabcock implied that it did of course.
I do like the idea of privacy contracts that some of XNS's features are built upon.
From the FAQ:
This contract specifies the privacy and security terms governing the data to be exchanged, including the specific privacy permissions and synchronization permissions granted by the data owner.
Well, many of the uses for this type of data require the exchange of the data with others, rather than simply the storage of the data for your own use. It may be nice to have personel access to your medical records in case you ever want to remember exactly which toe you broke in the third grade. It would probably be even more useful if you could allow select individuals such as your current doctor to have the ability to access the information, and only that information, you would grant them access to.
I want the child-car-seat manufacturer to be always able to send me recall notices and thus I need them to be able to find my mailing address, even when I move. XNS protocols promise this ability while preventing the child-car-seat manufacturer using that information for junk mail, if that is how I set up the privacy contract.
These types of data exhanges, regardless where the data is stored and who controls the access to it, will require some sort of data-exchange protocol. XNSorg seems to be working towards that protocol development in an open standards way which gives me more confidence than many of the other initiatives I have seen.
Having to carry all that information with you (maybe in a PDA or something?) if you want access to it is an additional burden.
Perhaps having an open standard for exchange of this type of information such as done by http://xns.org/, would allow multiple competing agencies to act as costodians. Give people choice and perhaps some of the control and privacy (and cost) issues would be less pressing than if all data was held by a single player such as Microsoft.
The article by Michael McCandless (stupid PDF file!) addresses some of the issues that XNS tries to address - albeit with the idea of the personal information residing on your network connected home computer rather than on an XNS-server run by some company that you decide to trust.
Now if XNS would get around to releasing their open source code examples and the detail technical specifications perhaps there could be more motion to widespread adoption. They claim plans to do so "real soon now".
With that said, XNS's ecard address book features are pretty nifty even at this early development stage.
There are however many problems thinking that war is the only or even first response that should be considered. What do we do if it turns out to not be state sponsored? If it was the FLQ do we start bombing Montreal or Ottawa? (The Federation du Liberation du Quebec was responsible for a number of bombings and deaths in the 1970's) If it was the IRA do we bomb Dublin? If it was a Protestant Irish group do we bomb Dublin again?
What level of state sponsorship is sufficient to assign responsibility? PETA is a registered non-profit organization in Australia, as are the boy-scouts. If either of them turns up as being responsible somehow do we level Perth?
What level of evidence should we use? If we bomb some-small-country into the ground and it turns out we were mistaken, what do we do then? What if group A tried to make it look like group B did the deed? (Which could happen even if group A was not involved at all.) Wanna get someone in deep deep deep do-do? Make people think it was their fault.
If we investigate and find out who is responsible (which could include state leaders) and indite them and ask for them to be extradited, and they are not forthcoming - at that point I would have much less problem with the declaration of war.
Part of the reason people resort to terrorism is the feeling that they are powerless within the system. The best way to combat terrorism and revolution and instability in my opinion is to ensure an effective, impartial, and fair legal system in addition to mechanisms for everyone to feel properly represented in governing their lives and future. Obviously the USA cannot do much to make sure that group A feels good about their situation with group B in country C (though foreign policy does have some influence in this area), but we can, and the very least, hope that the USA will follow both the spirit and the letter of the law when pursuing even the most evil of villans.
Agreed. The rule of law is one of the most important factors of modern "western" society.
Finding, catching, and prosecuting the culprits I think would be the best thing for the world at large.
Probably not, but a secure single sign on would be nice, if the proper privacy and security issues can be addressed. I think that XNS has a chance of doing this type of thing better than any of the closed source alternatively like Passport.
A google.com search on "einstein's wife" turns up a number of hits and books, including this or this or here. None can really doubt that Einstein wasn't brilliant, but perhaps at least one woman was also not too shabby?
If you are going to spend money on expensive solar cells and related electronics, you might as well put them in the best place where they can work most efficiently for the longest amount of time.
For short trips, there was a neat story in Discover about a electrical assisted pedal vehicle that sounded pretty cool.
The thing that holds them back I think is not so much the price of the hardware, but the lack of content.
But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.
iUniverse is cool - they will take any book you own the intelectual property for and make it available to all bookstores with an ISBN and standard ordering systems, for basically nothing. If you have a book that you wrote that went out of print, send them a copy and they scan it and for free, it is now back in and you can earn roalties. If you just wrote a new book and want it published, they'll do that too for a few hundred bucks send you a few copies and make your book available.
iUniverse doesn't do editing or promotion or anything like that, but that could be handled by a standard publisher. When Amazon or someone else orders up some copies, iUniverse prints them out and ships them off, on demand with no wasted money for storage of unwanted books.
They have a number of titles that would otherwise be unavailable, and will have those titles available "forever".
From what I understand, they seem to be set up to publish one's books in perpetuity. After they get a book together (manuscript, cover, edits, etc.) they make it available via the web, phone order, as well as through any traditional bookstore or places like Amazon.com via the standard ISBN ordering abilities. Whenever they get an order for a book, they print one, send it off, and cut a cheque for the author.
I don't think they do any promotion of the books, but for out of print books by previously published authors they also don't seem to charge any fee, so it seems like a no-risk (or at least minimal risk) type of activity.
Their different publishing programs are here
There might be similar places around, and I don't know how good this place is, but I do know of at least one very good technical Macintosh book who's author is using this service.
There are more hoops to jump through and restrictions (and fees) on international accounts at PayPal.
For this reason, I've maintained my USA PayPal account, even though it now has an incorrect USA addresses "confirmed" along with it. My Canadian PayPal account I was going to close completely, but I have kept it alive in case they someday normalize their policies.
There is an article about it here, as well as his own words here.
I have started to use PayPal to send a few bucks to people who's freeware I use or who's causes I like. I keep about $20 in my PayPal account that I have generated from ebay sales of thinks like junk-to-me books or electronic bits, and occasionally send $5 to someone for GPL software or things like that.
I think that this model for content payment is workable, but maybe not at the corporate level.
Maybe I'll send fairtunes a few bucks...
For this business model to be truly effective, it's going to have to be the stores themselves that take the orders, assemble them, and then deliver them to the customers.
I think that this type of model can be used to set up a network of local stores. Someone external supply the web front end, and the store does all the rest.
This seems to be what The Peachtree Network is doing.
I have not tried them out yet (and with local stores doing the work the service might be quite variable), but plan on using them next year when we move to Peterborough, ON, served by Charlotte Pantry, just down the street from our new house.
If you are not using such a service yet, go check to see if they have a presence in your Canadian or USian postal code. If not, you can send them the contact information for your favourite local grocer and perhaps get service started.
Of course there isn't (I think Denny's will give you one on your birthday...), but since the non-solar industry gets huge tax breaks and indirrect subsidation shouldn't we elliminate that too?
The bailout monies being talked about for the California energy companies are similar in magnitude to that required to set up solar panels on enough roofs to generate the energy shortfall currently causing blackouts. Which is a better use of our monies?
Actually, it says that it must be provided for no additional or only nominal charge to people to whom the binaries are provided. It sets no limit on charges for the binaries and sets no requirement that it be provided to non-customers.
If you want to charge $9999999 for your linux distribution, you can. You need not provide sources to anyone but your customers.
Granted, however, that since your customers can redistribute it once they have it, that might not be a good business model. However if you can make just one sale, maybe that would be enough...
Tie where? Oh! You mean "can't tie their shoe laces..."
Or maybe that should be "shoelaces".
Never mind.
One might think that one purpose of source form would be for modification, and thus would fall under the "any purpose" section.
The actual lisence states: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted ..."
Again, one could argue that without further clarification, "...use in source and binary forms..." would include modification of the source, since that is one of the primary uses of source code. Similar arguements could be made about using the code in other works.
Thus it is not completely unjustified in stating that the "clarification" clause that was added did in fact substatively change the lisence the code was released under.
C Watson has directions for the Mac, and freedb.org has some instructions for doing the same on other platforms.& artid=46
http://www.cam.org/~cwatson/freedb/
http://www.freedb.org/sections.php?op=viewarticle
And if you are messing about with your hosts file already, you might want to include redirection for various web advertisers to speed up your web browsing.s html
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/spam/adblock.
Mac OS X seems to use a different mechanism than the hosts files for most setups, preferring the Netinfo tool. There are some details about it at Mac OS X Hints, but I have not figured it out completely myself.0 328234510985 0 515062331512
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2001
Here is another new one just posted on May 15th that I have yet to read and understand.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2001
This also means that all of your applications that would normaly want to use CDDB will use freedb.org without having to change their settings or hack their resources.
Now does anyone want to let me know how to easily do this with Mac OS X? I can't seem to get the Netinfo utility to do it effectively.
While you are at it, you might want to play similar tricks with advertising banners and the like. Here's more information.
There is a maximum length of time for any copyright in the compyright legislation. Currently it is this lifetime+70 years thing for the creator or some set timeframe (100 years?) for the corporation.
No, there is a relation ship between ice-cream and sexual assualts because they both have some relationship to some other factor. I think this is because ice-cream sales tend to follow good, warm weather when people are outside more often, and maybe wearing less clothing.
I suspect that there is a negative coorelation between such crimes and sales of snow-blowers, for example.
Crime could decrease upon the introduction of cameras (and I am not saying that it does) because administrations that install cameras might also spend more on policing, education, prosecution, and other things. Maybe cameras are installed when there is money available such as when tax revenues are up due to a strong economy and good employement stats, which also tend to decrease some crime stats independant of any camera installations.
Yeah, I'm a stinker, eh?
Surely though you have seen various studies that question the US's supremacy in all sorts of standard of living areas? One has to have lived in a cave over the past decade to avoid health care comparisons. Cecil Adams did some reporting on average work week and vacation days at http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010302.html. The UN makes reports all the time. Various US groups make all sorts of reports.
Even if one disagrees with the conclusions of these types of reports, the mere fact that there are billions of people around the world who have set up their societies differently than the USA should give one pause. The mere fact that there are many countries with obviously similar levels of citizen happiness should show that the USA is not necessarily doing everything the only way possible. The fact that many in the USA do not think that the USA is doing everything the way it should might be considered to be evidence enough.
But this isn't supposed to be a bash of the USA, but rather a bash of the idea that "There is nothing more important than wealth creation." and that "The kind of socialist ideal implied by open source, where no-one makes pits of money is very bad for the country.". There are many "socialist" types of ideals that are good for the country - examples can be drawn from both inside and outside the USA (public infrastructure like roads, public libraries, public education, various forms of taxes and tax support, etc.) People can and do argue about each of these sorts of things, but as a society we have decided that they have significant value.
Wealth creation isn't everything. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, far from it, but it shouldn't be everyone's end goal. If it was, we would all be poorer.
The kind of socialist ideal implied by open source, where no-one makes pits of money is very bad for the country. If this happens, you get barely affluent people - people such as yourself, who in the main don't pursue any philanthropic activity.
The USA is hardly a model for "good living". The health stats for the US poor are not very great compared to other industrialized nations. The gap between the rich and poor, worker rights, environmental standards, and all sorts of other things that seem to be better addressed in other more "socialist ideal" influenced countries is not the best commendation for the current system.
Your points about innovation may turn out to be true - but really there is no good data to support them yet. It is certainly true that financial considerations can provide great incentives, but it is also true that without proper checks and balances such drives can make for terrible long term decisions that can effect the entire society.
I would put forth that anyone who thinks that wealth creation is the most important thing in the universe needs to spend a little more time thinking about community, family, health, and happiness. Money can be an important tool, but it is just that, a tool. Don't be just a tool seeker.